(Taken from CubaDebate)

"Opium is cultivated in diverse regions of the world: South America; the Golden Triangle of Laos, Burma and Thailand; Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, in a region known as the Golden Crescent. The vast majority of opium poppies grow in a narrow mountainous area of approximately 6,000 kilometers that stretches from southern Asia to Turkey, passing through Pakistan and Laos.

"At this height, it is clear that the Bilderbergers are not personally in charge of transporting the drugs or laundering the money resulting from the profits. The CIA is in charge of that…"

"…Neil Clark notes the following: ‘Soros is angry, not about Bush’s objectives—extending the Pax Americana and making the world a safer place for capitalists like himself—but at the crude and blatant method Bush is employing to achieve that.’"

"‘The Marshall Plan proposed for the Balkans is an illusion […] Financed by the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), as well as private creditors, it will principally benefit mining, oil, and construction companies and will inflate foreign debt until well into the third millennium.’"

"The consolidation of NATO’s power in southern Europe and the Mediterranean also constitutes a step toward the expansion of Bilderberg’s geopolitical sphere of influence beyond the Balkans to the area of the Caspian Sea, Central Asia and Western Asia."

"In the first week of November 1999, I received something that initially appeared to be a postcard sent from Ladispol, a small village near Lazio, Rome, on the Mediterranean coast."

"March 30, 1980 was the date on which we officially left the Soviet Union. While we were in Italy, we established ourselves in Ladispol, a tiny village that would be our home for the next year."

"I went out into the street. It was drizzling. Two little children were delightedly jumping and splashing around from puddle to puddle, leaving their footprints on the pavement. I crossed the elegant street below the storm clouds and opened the door of the pub right on the corner of my house. November 29, 1999. What the hell did all that mean? I read the words again. ‘I’m doing fine. Wish you were here.’ Signed: Fashoda. Who the hell was that guy?"

"‘Fashoda isn’t a person but a place!’ I could feel my heart pumping. November 29, 1999 […] Suddenly, I sat upright in my seat. ‘Fashoda, Travis Read!!!’"

"Travis was a criminal who I had met at the Bilderberg Club meeting in King City in 1996. He was a small-time thief, undisciplined and detestable […] Travis was prone to getting arrested and, almost with the same speed, getting released again."

"As I discovered later, Travis Read had turned into a criminal in order to work with criminals."

"He was sent to Sudan by contacts who worked for both the CIA and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the RCMP […] The details of his trip to Sudan were never revealed but, just like in 1989, that godforsaken place attracted all the most inappropriate types of people for the most appropriate reasons."

"‘If Travis wants to see me, this is going to turn into a big mess,’ I said to myself."

"I have to admit that when things got bad, I always trusted the old Soviet officials. Something intrinsic in them made them mistrust the West and they didn’t let themselves to be bought easily, as opposed to what mainstream newspapers and press reports would have you believe."

"They weren’t the class of people you’d want to betray. I knew that I was safe with them. My grandfather had risked his life in the early 1950s to save the lives of the fathers of these men, KGB agents…"

"On November 27, late at night, my cell phone rang. It was Travis. He was staying in some dive on the outskirts of Rome."

"—Piazza della Repubblica at 5.30 p.m.—I interrupted him.

"—I’m setting the rules—shouted Travis."

"—You want the information or not?—Travis asked.

"—Not enough to get killed—I said coldly."

"Travis didn’t show up for the meeting. Around 8.30 p.m. we rushed over to his residence, if you can call it that, guns in hand. The one-room dive had been completely turned over. Even so, there was no sign of a struggle, bloodstains or the body of Travis Read. As far as I know, he was never heard of again."

"From time to time, the ghost of Travis appears in the furthest recesses of my mind, a morbid memory of the fragility and fallibility of the human spirit."

That is how Estulin concludes Chapter 3.

"CHAPTER 4"

"Bilderberg and the secret war in Afghanistan"

"The reasons for which wars are waged are rooted in the ideology reflected in school text books: nations go to war for terribly long periods of time on the basis of lies, as demonstrated by World War 1 and every conflict of the 20th century.

"The famous historian Edmund Morgan wrote the following: ‘History never repeats itself. It only seems like it does to those who do not know the details.’"

"The Caspian Sea Basin and Central Asia are key to energy in the 21st century. Two thirds of oil reserves are in that region […] ‘America wants the region to be under the total U.S. domination,’ according to James Donan in an article published in the Oil & Gas Journal trade magazine on October 9, 2001."

"…Madeline Albright [then secretary of state under the Clinton administration and one of the people responsible for the Kosovo war] concluded that ‘working to mold the area’s future is one of the most exciting things we can do,’ according to the May 1998 issue of Time magazine.

"The Gulf war allowed the Pentagon to establish numerous military bases in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere."

"As Professor Michel Chossudovsky has documented in War and Globalization, the GUUAM alliance (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Moldova) formed by NATO in 1999, lies at the heart of the Caspian oil and gas wealth. An essential component of GUUAM is Georgia – a client state of the United States – where Mikhail Saakashvili replaced as president former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze via a coup d’état cooked up by the Americans and presented as a popular and spontaneous revolt."

According to Project Underground […] former members of the Soviets, the KGB and the Politburo are taking advantage of the oil wealth, together with ‘a formidable collection of significant Cold War figures, principally from the George [H. W.] Bush cabinet. The players are the former advisors of Reagan, Bush and Clinton, such as James Baker III (ex-secretary of state in the Bush Sr. administration), Dick Cheney (vice president) and John Sununu (ex-chief of staff at the White House)."

"…Peter Sutherland (of British Petroleum), Queen Elizabeth II of Britain (major shareholder in British Petroleum and head of the Committee of 300), who are fighting for control of oil resources and the oil pipeline corridors leaving the Caspian Sea Basin. In 1998, following the secret meeting of the Bilderberg Club in Scotland, I reported in the independent media that NATO, following the orders of the Club that founded it, gave Russia carte blanche to bomb Chechnya, knowing that that would further increase hostilities between those two countries whose mutual hatred dates back more than 300 years."

"The Afghan oil pipeline wasn’t simply a business but a key component of a wider geostrategic agenda: total military and economic control of Eurasia (the Middle East and the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia). George Monbiot confirmed as much in The Guardian on October 23, 2001: ‘But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan…’"

"After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Argentine Bridas oil company, directed by its ambitious president Carlos Bulgheroni, was the first company to exploit the oilfields of Turkmenistan, where some of the largest natural gas reserves in the world are to found […] Afghanistan is the shortest route to the Gulf for transporting the gas resources of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan from North Central Asia and West Central Asia."

"To the dismay of Bridas', UNOCAL went directly to the regional leaders with its own proposal. UNOCAL formed its own competing U.S-led, Washington-sponsored consortium, which included Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia, along with Saudi Prince Abdullah and King Fahd…"

"According to Ahmed Rashid, ‘UNOCAL's real influence with the Taliban was that their project carried the possibility of U.S. recognition, which the Taliban were desperately anxious to secure.’ […] In the spring of 1996, UNOCAL executives flew to Dallas Uzbek leader General Abdul Rashid Dostum (a mass murderer responsible for the Dasht-i-Leili massacre in December 2001 in which hundreds of Taliban prisoners were deliberately suffocated in metal truck containers while being driven by American and Northern Alliance soldiers to the prison in Kunduz, Afghanistan) in order to discuss routing the pipeline through his northern (Northern Alliance-controlled) territories."

"The competition between UNOCAL and Bridas, as described by Rashid, ‘began to reflect the competition within the Saudi Royal family.’ In 1997, Taliban officials traveled on two occasions to Washington, D.C. and Buenos Aires to be wined and dined by UNOCAL and Bridas."

"Once again, violence would change the course of events. In response to the bombing of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania (attributed to Osama bin Laden, although according to French intelligence sources, the attack was the work of the Israeli Mossad), President Bill Clinton fired cruise missiles at vacated tents in Afghanistan and Sudan on August 20, 1998. The administration then broke off diplomatic relations the Taliban, and UN sanctions were imposed."

"For the remainder of the Clinton presidency, there would be no official U.S. or UN recognition of Afghanistan. And no progress on the pipeline.

"Then George Walker Bush entered the White House."

"During the final months of the Clinton administration, the Taliban were officially a terrorist group. After almost a decade of fierce competition between the UNOCAL-CentGas consortium supported by the United States and Bridas of Argentina, no company had managed to reach an agreement to construct an oil pipeline in Afghanistan […] George W. Bush reestablished relations with the Taliban. That should come as no surprise given that in 1998 and again in 2000, former President George H.W. Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia on behalf of the Carlyle Group, the eleventh largest contractor of the U.S. Department of Defense, where he had private meetings with the Saudi royal family and the family of Osama bin Laden, according to the September 27, 2001 edition of the Wall Street Journal."

"In one of the most surreal and Kafkaesque episodes of the events prior to 9/11, The Washington Post quotes Milt Bearden, a CIA agent who helped to establish the Afghan Mujahideen, lamenting the fact that the United States had not taken time to understand the Taliban, affirming: ‘We never heard what they were trying to say [...]. ‘We had no common language. Ours was, 'Give up Bin Laden.' They were saying, 'Do something to help us give him up.’’’ But there is much more."

"In fact, the relationship between the Bush administration and the ‘terrorist’ and leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was never better."

"The evidence of the war in Afghanistan, where multinational avarice is mixed with the avarice and cruelty of the oil greats (BP, Shell, Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, etc.) is simply irrefutable. It is shocking to think that a corner abandoned by the hand of God, controlled by terrorists, could be converted into a point where the interests of the Bush administration, Bridas, UNOCAL, the CIA, the Taliban, Enron, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Russia and India are all combined."

Under the epigraphy "A Cowboy in the White House," Daniel Estulin notes:

"Bush formed his cabinet with figures from the energy industry with close links in Central Asia (Dick Cheney of Halliburton, Richard Armitage of UNOCAL, Condoleeza Rice of Chevron) and came to power thanks to the generosity of corporations like Enron with rights acquired in the region."

"The participation of the Bush family in the oil politics of the Middle East and Central Asia and its profound links with the Saudi royal family and the Bin Laden family have existed for generations."

"…The Bilderberg members left no loose ends. They are not working to a five-year plan. They are planning in the longer term. In the early 70s, they prepared a Plan B, a plan for oil sharing that included the United States and another 11 important industrialized countries, by establishing a mechanism under which Allen sustains the following: ‘For the first time in American history oil produced within the United States would be shared and assigned in the case of another Middle East oil embargo.’"

"’The ‘test’ of 1973, prepared by Bilderberg members, clearly demonstrates that oil will be utilized as a weapon of control. What happened in 1973 alerted ‘the American people and made them see how much control foreign governments and multinational corporations could exert over the nation,’ writes David A. Rivera in Final Warning: A History of the New World Order."

Chapter 5 covers:
"MATRIX: Data Bases and Total Information Awareness"

"Generally speaking, it is much easier to reach an agreement if there are no listeners. It is not a question of secretiveness, but of capacity to act in a more efficient way."

NEIL KINNOCK, European commissioner and member of the Bilderberg Club

"The Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) Program is a system based on a coded phrase and implies the gradual dissolution of America’s precious individual liberties defended by the Constitution, in favor of a global, totalitarian state. Much of the details of this gigantic espionage system remain a mystery. In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the TIA has become a surveillance network that is ‘representative of a greater tendency which has appeared in the United States and in Europe: the apparently inexorable flow toward a society under surveillance.’"

"The principal axis of the Total Information network is a new and extraordinary mode known as Data mining, or the discovery of knowledge presupposing the automated extraction of concealed predictive information based on data bases."

"Putting into practice an incomparable capacity for processing billions of registers per second, Accurint has compiled the largest register of accessible contact data in the world. Accurint searches more than 20 billion registers that cover recent house moves to old addresses dating back more than 30 years."

"…when asked for more information, company executives refused to disclose more specific details on the nature of the sources of the data."

"According to Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for privacy-related issues in the American Civil Liberties Union, ‘Matrix turns every American into a suspect.’"

"Associated Press has revealed that, in January 2003, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, informed Vice President Dick Cheney, Tom Ridge, who was about to be sworn in as secretary of the new Office of Homeland Security, and Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, about the secret project that would demonstrate how the security forces could use a computer program to capture ‘terrorists.’"

"On the other hand, Iberia, the principal Spanish airline company, has been accused of giving confidential information on its passengers to the U.S. government…"

"’The United States is obliging airlines to hand over details on travelers,’ Andy Sullivan, Reuters, March 17, 2004."

"In the same way, NASA has also asked for and received confidential information on the passenger details of millions of Northwest Airlines clients, such as names, addresses, travel itineraries and credit card numbers, for a similar data mining study... incidents have generated dozens of lawsuits. This also represented a violation of its own policy."

"’Northwest Airlines is handing over to NASA personal information on millions of passengers; the transfer violates the privacy policy,’" Electronic Privacy Information Center, January 18, 2004.

"'Northwest Airlines hands over passenger data to government,’ Jon Schwartz, USA Today, January 19, 2004."

He dedicates an epigraphy to:

"Commissioner Almunia; Borrell, president; and Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission and another Bilderberg habitué, organized a grand campaign in favor of the approval of fundamental rights, allegedly sacred, in the European Constitution [...] What neither Borrell, nor Almunia, nor Barroso have said to the good European citizens is that each and every one of their rights, according to Article 51, can be suspended if ‘the interests of the Union’ require it."

"However, there is a lot more to say in terms of the shameful demonstration of betrayal on the part of the European Commission in relation to its own citizens."

"European control of telecommunications: vote in European Parliament to accept the retention of data and surveillance on the part of the security forces.

"Voting on the retention of data of May 30, 2002 (In the former European legislation, PPE and PSE votes brought together 526 Euro deputies out of a total of 626).

"Statewatch and Reporters sans frontiers were the only organizations to inform on what resulted in decisions affecting hundreds of millions of Europeans."

"Basically, the grandiloquence and defiance of socialists on questions of national and international law are a farce. The alliance of the PPE and PSE groups in the European Parliament has demonstrated that they support the demands of the EU governments, instead of acting in defense of the people and defending citizens’ rights to privacy and civil liberties."

"Javier Solana Madariaga, a key member of the Bilderberg Group, former NATO secretary general and secretary general of the European Union Council/High Representative for Common Security and Defense Policy, in a decision that the International Association of Journalists simply christened "a summer coup d’état." Remember, readers, that characters like Javier Solana do not represent your interest or the interests of Spain."

Afterwards, Estulin documented everything over 16 pages.

His book includes an epigraphy called "My End."

"The creative memory is the most subtle opponent of historians. The pretext of forgetting governs and deforms everything that we decide to openly record. Existence and the world would seem to justify themselves only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Only aesthetic implies not life for life, but a sharp contrast with the moral interpretation of existence and the world.

"Amos Oz, probably the best-known Israeli novelist, made this observation: ‘There, where war is called peace; there, where oppression and persecution are named security, and murder, liberation, the contamination of language precedes and prepares the contamination of life and dignity. In the end, the state, the regime, the class or ideas remain intact while human life is destroyed.’"

"If democracy is the government of the people, the secret objectives of governments and sinister pressure groups are incompatible with democracy. The very idea of clandestine spheres of influence within government that embark on secret campaigns against humanity is, thus, alien to the notion of liberty and must be combated with enthusiastic determination, unless we wish to repeat the fatal errors of a not too distant past."

"In a society constantly more dismembered, there are certain elements that make it possible to highlight what we share, what we have in common, and make it possible to do so directly, with dramatic intensity. Human dignity and a genuine desire for freedom, which is instantly understood anywhere in the world and needs no translation, are some of the most valuable aspects of the universal tradition. It merits all the support that it can get.

"Finally, if criticizing the arrogant, unthinking and abusive aspects of the totalitarian society sometimes makes people mock you and label you an "anti-everything," you should consider it an honorable distinction. Graham Greene had the key when he said that "a writer must be ready to change sides at any moment. His mission is to defend the victims and the victims change."

Finally, he dedicates eight-and-a-half pages to the memory of his grandfather.

"That was the last time that I saw him alive. An old man of average complexion, 96 years of age, seated on his dilapidated couch, looking through his exaggerated spectacles, meeting my look, but barely capable of recognizing my eyes. He was alive because he moved and spoke, or rather because he was making an inhuman effort to join together the letters, which were spilling over in the furthermost places of the depths of the consciousness that was left to him and were stubbornly refusing to come together to form coherent syntagma. In the final months of his long life, my grandfather, a man who used to express himself with clarity and who was captivated by humor and debate, was literally lost for words. In a kind of final act of cruelty, cancer robbed him of language before robbing him of life.

"With my return flight ticket to Spain in my hand, I passed by his house to bid him farewell. In my last visit we didn’t say anything much. I couldn’t find the appropriate words. He was breathless and it cost me to breathe because I knew that I would never see him again. ‘Adios’ was a too simple and too terrible expression.

"On the living room table, propped up against the wall, was a photograph of my grandparents, taken shortly after their arrival in Canada in 1983. My grandmother had died a little more than one year previously. My grandfather, gravely ill at that moment, never recovered from the loss of somebody who he had loved profoundly for more than 40 years."

"Trying in every way not to burst out crying, I continue reminding myself that these pages are a vindication of honesty at the expense of cruelty and opportunity. The principal theme is not politics, nor is it an open criticism of totalitarianism, but rather a beat of the heart of a man, and for that I pay him tribute. It is for that reason that it should be read.

"Like the rest of us, people die at least twice: physically and conceptually. When the heart stops beating and when oblivion begins. The most fortunate ones, the great ones, are those in which the second death is postponed in a considerable way, perhaps indefinitely [...] Calls came in from all the countries and imaginable corners of the planet, a tribute to the infinite admiration that he, my grandfather, a former KGB counterespionage agent, instilled in those persons whose lives he influenced."

"His grandfather was a soldier among soldiers. He spent 25 years defending the Czarist Empire, Alexander II and Alexander III. My grandfather continued the military tradition of the family. He took part in the Revolution, the Russian civil war and the two world wars. While he was defending Minsk in the initial weeks of the Second World War, his whole family, 11 brothers and sisters, his father, his mother and a grandmother of 104 years of age, were exterminated by the Nazis in Karasy-Bazar, Crimea."

"He really lived a life. He did not simply limit himself to living."

"My grandfather had married on one occasion, in 1930. He had had three children. Then the war came. He fought in Belarus, defended Brest, but was forced to withdraw with what was left of the Red Army due to the German advance. At some point, in the resultant chaos, he lost track of his family. A mother and three children of eight, five and three years could not move as rapidly as the Red Army or the Nazi soldiers. They were captured by the Nazis, sent to a concentration camp and exterminated.

"The Second World War, as I demonstrate in this book and as I have amply revealed in my first book on the Bilderberg Club, was astutely financed by the Rockefellers, the Loebs and the Warbergs. Prince Bernhard, a founder member of the Bilderberg Club, was also implicated. He was a Nazi. Most members of the British royal family were in sympathy with the Nazis, as was a large part of the "liberal" East Coast Establishment of the United States, the plutocratic network which dominates the economic, political and social life of that country. Hitler, the beast, was created by the same people who, today, secretly attend the meetings of the Bilderberg Club, the CFR and the Trilateral Commission. History, for these people, is a blank chalkboard on which to defecate against the anguish of others. Can I be blamed for so much despising Bilderberg and his counterparts?"

"In my case, my grandfather continues being my cornerstone—travel companion—including after his death. He is as absent as he is present.

"Time and space, the devices of a world wounded everywhere, the mountain of waste that we call history, which also represent his successes. They are his successes. Like time, they conserve the magic that makes him disappear.

"I remember him above all when his birthday comes around. But, for me, this year is different. Age is an accumulation of life and of loss. Adult age is a series of lines crossed. I have crossed a threshold. From now onwards, I am alone…"

In the second part of this Reflection I have compiled a large quantity of the final lines of his book. They explain his contempt for the odious institution of the Bilderberg Club.

It is terrible to think that the intelligences and sentiments of children and youth in the United States are mutilated in that way.

Today, we have to fight to avoid being led into a nuclear holocaust, and to restore as much as possible their physical and mental health and to think and plan the ways in which human beings can be liberated for ever from such a terrible fate.

Fidel Castro Ruz

August 18, 2010

5:54 p.m.